Family Stories as Accessible Resource for Social Justice Education: A Case Study of Three Generations of Anglo Family Stories and Confronting Whiteness
Presentation (Faculty180)
Anglo identity and white identity can be disentangled by analyzing the family stories and by drawing on sources from outside the family stories, using Critical Whiteness Studies (Cabrera, 2016) as a framework. Doing so has potential for social justice education (Teaching Tolerance, 2016) toward revealing and challenging the hegemony of white domination propounded in schools. Families “perform family narratives to assert complicated and shifting identities as they constitute themselves against expectations from inside and outside the family sphere” (Borland et al, 2017). We consider Anglo family stories as told by three generations as traditions retold to meet different purposes. “Tradition and innovation” can link folkloristics, an inherently conservative discipline, with social justice, a radical project. Family stories provide resources for the emotionally and socially challenging work of coming to terms with white domination in which Anglo Americans have been and still are active participants, most effectively enacting and normalizing it hegemonically in schools. Collecting Anglo family stories must involve both recognizing the importance of family stories as “validat[ing] one’s status in civil society” (Fine & van den Scott, 2011, p. 1322), and going beyond the "ethnography of niceness" (Greenhill, 2002), particularly for those who will be teachers or teacher educators, in order to avoid the twin paralyses of “white guilt” and “white fragility” that prevent teaching professionals from effectively addressing the problem of the predominance and domination of white teachers nationally (Picower, 2009). Key is differentiating between Anglo ethnicity (Kaufmann, 2004) and Whiteness (Leonardo, 2009) in order for dominant culture white teachers to become social justice educators.